RIM woes continue with delayed BlackBerry 10 launch

Research In Motion (RIM)'s troubles show no sign of letting up, after the Canadian firm confirmed that its new BlackBerry 10 operating system has been delayed until 2013.

RIM confirmed the delay while reporting a $518m (£334m) net loss in the three months to June 2, compared to a $695m profit in the same period a year earlier.

Revenue in the quarter fell 43% to $2.8 billion, as sales of the BlackBerry smartphones fell for the second quarter running.

The company said that it will look to cut 5,000 jobs as it seeks to realize over $1 billion in cost savings.

RIM has endured a torrid 12 months due to competition from Apple's iPhone and Google Android devices, but also sluggish sales of its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and a reputation-damaging service outage last October.

This has resulted in RIM's share price falling around 70% over the past year. After announcing its quarterly results, the stock slumped a further 18% to just $7.47 in extended trading in New York.

Thorsten Heins, who took over as president and chief executive of RIM earlier in the year, said that the business's latest quarterly results reflect the "market challenges" it faces.

"I am not satisfied with these results and continue to work aggressively with all areas of the organization and the board to implement meaningful changes to address the challenges, including a thoughtful realignment of resources and honing focus within the company on areas that have the greatest opportunities," he said.

"Our top priority going forward is the successful launch of our first BlackBerry 10 device, which we now anticipate will occur in the first quarter of calendar 2013.

"In parallel with the roll-out of BlackBerry 10, we are aggressively working with our advisers on our strategic review and are actively evaluating ways to better leverage our assets and build on our strengths, including our growing BlackBerry subscriber base of approximately 78 million, our large enterprise installed base, our unique network architecture and our industry-leading security capabilities."

RIM said that it has made "major progress" with many of the key features of BlackBerry 10, but the integration of the large volume of code for the platform has "proven to be more time consuming than anticipated", resulting in the delay.

"RIM's development teams are relentlessly focused on ensuring the quality and reliability of the platform and I will not compromise the product by delivering it before it is ready," said Heins.

"I am confident that the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones will provide a ground-breaking next generation smartphone user experience.

"We are encouraged by the traction that the BlackBerry 10 platform is gaining with application developers and content partners following the successful BlackBerry Jam sessions that we have held around the world since the beginning of May.

"Similarly, the reception of the BlackBerry 10 platform by our key carrier partners has been very positive and they are looking forward to going to market with BlackBerry 10 smartphones in the first quarter of calendar 2013."

But with Samsung's new Android-powered Galaxy S3 already on the market and Apple expected to release the new iPhone in October, it could be too little too late for RIM when a phone running the OS finally launches next year.

Analysts and investors have expressed concern about the BlackBerry 10 delay, but also that RIM is now starting to lose money.

Eric Jackson, hedge fund manager at Ironfire Capital in Toronto, told the BBC: "These [quarterly results] are brutal and it looks like it's going to continue to get worse before it gets better with this new wrinkle of the delay of BB10.

"The company [is] now losing money. For a long time it's been able to say it's solidly profitable. And yet now it's starting to dip in the red and that's going to continue for several quarters.

"And there's really no guarantee that once they come out on the other side of BB10 that it's going to be something that people will want."